Google, following through on its promise that the material design spec is a "living document," has updated its design guidelines and suggestions again, this time adding more guidance on motion design, along with new sections for growth & communications and expanding panels.

First up, let's look at what's new in motion - Google has given motion design a more comprehensive section, outlining the principles of motion in material design. The section explains that material motion is responsive, natural, aware, and intentional. Transitions should be quick, clear, and cohesive.

After that brief primer, the motion section goes on to detail - at length - everything from duration and easing to transforming pieces of material and thinking about custom motion patterns that fit in with the material world.

Next is growth and communications. This may not sound like something that belongs in a design spec right off the bat, but Google has collected design patterns that have already been established by the community and some of its own ideas with specs and example designs, squeezing the design approaches into a broader discussion of the role onboarding, user education, and feature discovery play in growing your app.

This section, too, is replete with beautiful sample screens and animations.

Though this latest update to the material spec may seem small in a bulleted list, it's actually quite expansive. Both new sections (and yes the page on expanding panels) are thoughtfully written and full of helpful visual aids.

But one problem still lingers, and it's one that's haunted the material spec from the beginning - a lack of clear instruction for developers on how to actually implement brand new ideas. Unfortunately developers are sometimes "on the hook" for newly endorsed elements, animations, and other changes that either don't exist in code yet or aren't clearly documented, so seeing a bit more of a developer focus on these concepts would certainly be a welcome change - making those animations happen is anything but easy.

Nevertheless, Google is doing a great job in keeping its design playbook (I'll take every chance I get to say it's not a rulebook) up to date with new discoveries and emerging patterns. Check out the update for yourself below.

I don't think Google wants to get into the business of screening every app the same way Apple does - the fast turnaround of the Play Store is still a pretty big benefit for some developers. Now, evangelizing and educating on good design on the other hand is doable, and I think Google is making good efforts there.

Total Security

In the end it just matters how good the apps are and that the developers are still programming (because they want to and they can "easily" do it), lol.

Dick Dastardly✓ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ ᵉᵛᶦˡ

Actually that's one of Apple's policies I absolutely am in favour of. I mean look at all the rubbish apps that populate the Play Store bringing down the overall quality and user experience of Android apps. Maybe Apple sometimes takes it too far but still I'll prefer some alterations to Google's apps screening policies.

Does SVG support editable text layers and shadows, though? In my experience SVG is comparatively limited, and many designers are using tools like Sketch and AI anyway. But I suppose with some limited SVG based stickers you could still import them into other programs and create new text layers and such on your own.

David Onter

It supports shadows as embedded PNG's ^^'

Kawshik Ahmed

I want to know something
Does the work 'Desktop' always existed in Google Android Design Guideline??

I know that shadows are supported just fine and I'm pretty sure text layers work as well.

opticalgenesis

I totally agree on the point about the design guidelines not supporting devs properly. I'm in the process of teaching myself Android, but I have no clue on how to implement these lovely designs because there's no damn documentation. Obviously with the exception of certain APIs such as Palette, but that really seems to be an exception to the rule

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Bala

exactly... posting design guidelines without proper demo is like a half baked cookie. It delays the adaption of the new standard

jcopernicus

Can't wait to see Google not use any of this ever.

GG

pierx

...meanwhile at Titanium Backup

Averix

Google needs to provide some sample apps that demonstrate all these motions and such. Things developers can use to copy or learn from so they can create some really consistent apps. Every developer has to implement a lot of this motion on their own and some come up short on what it ends up behaving like.